10 Ways to Create an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

When it comes to creating effective content, planning out a strategy needs your utmost attention. Without a consistent marketing strategy your campaigns would most likely deemed unsuccessful. In order to get a business up and running, one should always plan things out beforehand.

Attracting customers to your website is hard work. The first thing that needs to be considered is having good content. Good content requires good use of words, grammar, authentic information and eye catching sentences. To become an effective content marketer, it is necessary to learn the basic skills of communication first.

Your content has a huge impact on readers. A well known content marketer, Jolie Millers explained effective content writing with some beautiful words:

“What i love about content is that it has the power to change people’s life, for a second or for a day or forever. Great content creates space for people to pause and reflect and this space is where transformation happens”

As web designers and developers, we need to understand the worth and weight of good content. Everything being posted on your website is being read by millions of people and to impact that many people, you should always write something that they would want to read. Here are a few tips on how to make your content a reader’s favorite:

1. Audience Engagement:

When a website is being created, one should be aware of the content on it, as you are more aware of your website than anyone else. It’s the responsibility of the organization to make sure that everything written on the website is legitimate, correct and aligning with the expectations of the reader. The real question here is: How to engage readers? During communication, the first thing to do is comprehend. Try to get into their minds and think like they think.

A writer should always know how to think from other people’s perspectives. Don’t write something offensive or understated. Keep the content interesting and low-key. People read things they can relate to and that can be done only if your thinking aligns with your audiences’ thought processes.

As a content marketer, audience engagement is necessary. Try to thoroughly examine target audience. In order to reach their level of thinking you can perform surveys or polls on things, ask questions on social media or find other engaging ways to know what your audience wants to see on the website. In general, get to know them.

2. Mission Statement:

Let’s start with understanding what a mission statement is. A simple, one or two line sentence that would help the organization recognize their goals and targets.

Creating a mission statement before writing content will make a big difference when the goals of the organization are being defined. Once your mission statement is ready, a company and its employees would have a sense of direction.Your team would be continuously reminded of why the company exists and what their path to success is.

Writing a mission statement isn’t that hard, this statement can be pretty straight forward. All you have to do is mention what the company is willing to provide to the audience and how well can they do it. For instance, Brand XYZ provides you with the best fun activities, nutritional advice, DIY children’s books and easy cooking recipes for you and your children. With the help of this statement, a number of things are categorized that need to be written about. This way, it is much easier to write things step by step.

One of the best examples of a mission statement is from Amazon:

“To be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.”

3. Up-to-Date:

On the internet, everything is in a rush. Within minutes, a trend starts and within a few more, it ends. People need something interesting to read/watch, which is why the minute something unique and astonishing comes forward, they leave everything aside and engage with that “trending” thing. By the end of the day, that uniqueness is exactly what would pay off; and your work would be recognized by the entire world. That’s how much power the internet has.

What you need to do as a content marketer is stay up-to-date about everything. For instance, if we talk about web development, right now, Vue Js is one of the most popular trending web development framework. Vue was created in 2014 and is gaining popularity in 2018. It is one of the most lightweight frameworks and it is highly responsive. VueJS is in a unique position as it is not backed by a major company. While React is backed by Facebook and Angular by Google, VueJS was created by one person, Evan You. It is because of its unique ability that it has gained this much popularity. These are the kinds of things to keep in mind.

You need to know what’s going on all around, what are the kinds of things your target audience is interested in? What new trends are keeping the interests of people? When you’re up-to-date about your surroundings, it will help you hone the skills that will positively affect the marketing skills.

4. Draft Ideas:

While working in an organization, it doesn’t matter how many hours are being put in or how much time is being spent inside the office. What matters is how many new ideas and thoughts are being produced for the betterment of the company. When you have ideas about something new and interesting, don’t just sit around and do nothing about them, work on those ideas and make something happen.

There’s no limit to creativity. You can think of something right now, that the audience might get attracted to and pitch that idea to your boss. That idea might be the start of something amazing. When ideas are being pitched, something new comes up every day and that ‘something new’ can be used in your content. Later, gather people’s reactions towards that. If the response is positive, you’re going in the right direction.

One way, that has proven to be most effective in gathering ideas, is by making a team after knowing your target audience. Have everyone pitch ideas and then there might be something interesting to find.. Speaking of pitching ideas, don’t limit yourself to self promotion. Add things that are informative to the audience otherwise they will get bored.

5. Target Audience:

In any brand marketing, target audience is the key to everything. Same is the case with content marketing. Try to understand audience as much as possible. Notice their main requirements.

First things first, how to find out the target audience? It’s not as difficult as you may assume but it’s also not easy. Your target audience can be defined if you are completely aware of what the brand is presenting to the world. For this, you need to be clear about kind of people that can be easily attracted by the brand. For example, if a clothing brand is being promoted, you’d want to write about things women or young girls take interest in.

The next step is understanding what the target audience wants? People love trendy things and depending on the nature of the product being sold, you should write content that is up to date. This way, you’ll get to interest you target audience in a better way.

After this check out where the audience might be having problems and provide them solutions for these problems. Once your audience knows that they’re being communicated with, they’ll know their importance within the company. Another thing is to appeal to their emotions, when it is possible. With the proper choice of words, you can tell them how much they mean to you.

6. Keep Changing Your Content:

No one likes reading the same thing continuously. Don’t you get tired when sometimes the same thing keeps appearing on the Facebook homepage and you just go ahead and unfollow the page that’s repeating their content? Your website is exactly like that. Having the same kind of content will bore the audience. No one wants to read the same things over and over again. Which is why, you need to keep bringing changes in the content being posted. Don’t get distracted from the main purpose, but don’t let the content be redundant as well.

Changing the content into something new and interesting is not that hard.. Find out what kind of content are people reading these days. Capture the interest of the audience by starting off with something that would immediately catch your audience’s eyes.

There’s another reason why your content should keep changing. That reason is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Google will notice changes in that particular article. If you update your content regularly, Google will notice that your site is alive and up-to-date.

7. Figure Out the KPIs:

When it comes to content marketing strategy, be aware of the key performance indicators or KPIs. The KPIs would help you analyze whether or not the content being posted is making any progress. Some of the essential key performance indicators that need to be taken care of are following:

– Bounce rate and average views

– Time spent on a blog

– Subscriptions gained

– Social media shares

– Conversation rate

– Number of comments posted

By knowing the key performance indicators of your website, you will be able to understand every action that is being taken, and if there is room for betterment, that would need to be figured out as well. When you are aware of all these KPIs, you can create better content or at least update the one that is already posted. If there is something more you need to know about KPI’s, click here.

8. Content Length:

One of the most common questions include: Is the content too long? Or is it too short? To be honest, the length of the content doesn’t matter. The thing being delivered is what matters.If you have enough information about a topic and you think you’re capable of gathering a large amount of audience through it, then it should definitely be considered.

On the other side, if content that only consists of a few 100 words seems to be creating impact, it’s less likely to show up on Google ranking but it may still be helpful for people who require the exact information.

The length of the content is only as important as the quality of material being added in it. Your quality should never be compromised just because you think more content should be added to the article.

9. Promote Your Content:

Your content creation has the same importance as content promotion. What’s the point of creating content and then not promoting it? In this modern age, the internet is bombarded with new and interesting things that people love to read. Whether they get to see it or not depends on your promotion efforts.

There are multiple ways to promote content. The most effective way of all is social media. Your content can be posted on Facebook profiles and shared amongst friends and family. For finding out about social media marketing, click here to read this blog about Facebook ad campaigns.

You need to make sure you’re promoting the content the right way and it is reaching the maximum amount of people. Use social media (Facebook, twitter, Instagram) and SEO to promote the content as much as possible. SEO is very important in promoting content. Google needs to know your posts are worthy of the top position.

10. Evaluate Your Content:

After being done with writing amazing content and promoting it on the social media, the last and final thing that needs to be done is an evaluation. See if what is being written is creating an impact on the audience.

Evaluate how the audience is responding to the content being posted. This is where the KPIs come in to the picture. Use real time data to make an analysis of your successes and failures. Draw up a plan of any changes that you can make so that your audience resonates better with the content being produced.

If this article has not quenched you thirst, click here for some more info on effective content marketing strategies.